HeadsUP! was founded in 2010 to challenge designers to apply data visualization to global issues. The competition was announced at PICNIC Amsterdam; Thomson-Reuters provided time on their TS2 digital signboards in Times Square; Visualizing.org provided the platform to host the data and competition.

GRACE Satellite data provided by UCI Professor Jay Famiglietti at JPL/NASA; Decadal Well Data was provided by Leonard Konikow, USGS. The winning animation, by interactive designer Richard Vijgen, was displayed across 19,000 square feet of digital signboard, four times an hour for four months, from March, 22, 2012 through August of that year.